iPlot

On Travel (including Journeys around the Room)

On board a KLM 747 to Amsterdam, I’m reading Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel as a preparation exercise for the TEDGlobal conference in two weeks.

De Botton's musings on travel are the required reading for a frequent traveler like me – a collection of mundane “running to stand still” moments, filled with memorable lines that affect you exactly the way traveling does: they are glimpses of greater meaning, a rejuvenating exposure to “otherness” that not only expands your horizon but also makes you believe again in the naïve assumption that the skies are friendly. It is a book about seeing the unseen (which is not necessarily the unknown). John Ruskin, the painter, is portrayed in a chapter on “Possessing Beauty,” and he chastises the hastiness of modern travelers: “The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he truly be a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.”

The most remarkable paragraph in the book, however, introduces Xavier de Maistre and his novel A Journey around My Room, the detailed account of a miniature travel experience from sofa to bed and back (with some notable digressions), and a defiant attempt to take Pascal’s famous adage ad absurdum: “The source of all of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” Maistre does not know either but at least he is capable of keeping his itinerary limited to an absolute minimum. There are “those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much,” de Botton quotes Nietzsche, before concluding: “Satisfied with the confines of his own bedroom, Xavier de Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen.”

Thinking about Germany’s Future

I was in Berlin again last week, at the Federal Chancellery. Earlier this year, I had the honor of participating in a series of expert hearings or what the Germans call "Zukunftswerkstatt" –a think tank hosted by Angela Merkel and dedicated to envisioning and discussing the future of the country (or at least the next two decades). I took part in a session on quality of life and welfare and a few weeks later in a roundtable with the "Bundeskanzleramtsminister" (I love the German language), the Minister of the Chancellery, Thomas de Maiziere (I guess the US equivalent would be Rahm Emanuel). The results of the hearings and workshops are documented in a book titled Deutschland's nächste Jahre - Wohin unsere Reise geht ("Germany's next years – where we're going from here”) that is available now in stores and on Amazon (in German only).

The Conversation Wars

Modernista did it. Skittles did it. And now the world’s hottest advertising firm, Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CPB), has done it, too: the NY outfit has re-launched its corporate web site as a conversational social hub that curates what is being said about CPB rather than staging what CPB has to say. Some may scoff at this move and denigrate it as “sooooo six months ago,” but I agree with Paul Isakson when he heralds the influence of the new CPB site on the rest of the industry as potentially paradigm-shifting.

The demarcation line here runs between pioneer and early adopter: CPG is the latter, no doubt, and while there’s nothing really innovative about the new site, it is nonetheless still radical relative to the vast majority of corporate web sites out there. Bringing CPB’s client portfolio to life by marrying the Kantian “You are what you do” with the Twitterian “You are what they say about you,” it certainly sets a new standard for the online presentation of creative industry brands. And – the proof is in the pudding – it accomplishes the ultimate goal of any conversational site: it is the talk of the town (or at least that of Madison Avenue).

However, as I was browsing through the plethora of content on the new (beta) CPB.com, an unsettling feeling came over me. It occurred to me that the trend of conversational corporate web sites going mainstream might trigger an unexpected, inadvertent effect. With brands turning into curators of conversations about them and brand value increasingly determined by the value of aggregated content, third parties might be inspired to hijack these very brands by offering curated conversations on their behalf.

Similar to Google’s profiting from original content on the backs of original publishers, brand-specific aggregators could benefit from being parasites of original brands’ social universe. In other words, what if Skittles faced unexpected competition from a third-party site that provided a much more comprehensive and easier-to-access curation of Skittles conversations than Skittles.com itself? Or if McDonalds suddenly saw itself confronted with a site aggregating blogs, videos, news, and tweets, all about but not by McDonalds? Think of this as the logical extension of the company profiles that already exist on LinkedIn and XING, which aggregate individual member data into a fairly transparent view of companies, including employee information and recent news. Indeed, third-party brand curators might realize that brands live in the ‘social commons,’ and that whoever builds the right aggregation mechanism and establishes the most popular channels to reach a mass audience will “own” the branded conversation on the web.

This scenario will hardly be a conflict that brands can legally solve, and it may therefore present a troubling blind spot in the social media ecosystem. Sure, brands can claim their corporate URLs and even their Facebook profiles (not always their Twitter feeds, as you can see exemplified by http:/twitter.com/ted – “I got it first, I win.”). Aggregators, however, operate in social web’s no man’s land, in indisputable territory.

Brand value, extremely volatile anyway, would then become completely unmanageable for the original brand owner. The very transcendence that is emblematic of powerful brands, may become their curse: brand loyalty is not so much loyalty towards a certain company; rather it is – as the name implies – loyalty towards a brand, wherever it lives and however it appears, both of which not limited to the confines of the official representation on the brand owner’s properties. It is the conundrum of successful brand builders that the bigger their brand becomes, the more likely their risk that they lose it to the social commons. Skittles and CPB have recognized that the main threat for their brands is not coming from competitors at the center of their industry but from outliers at the fringes –and they have preempted it, at least so far. My advice for all the others, the late adopters: Take action quickly and launch your own branded aggregation portals before third parties beat you to the punch!

While third-parties might try to benefit from curating branded conversations, Twitter produces the reverse trend as well: brands acting as parasites of existing third-party conversations. UK furniture retailer Habitat had to apologize for referencing the popular hashtag #iranelection in its Twitter feeds. (Over)-eager to drive eyeballs to its feed, it had committed the ultimate sin of social brands: it had stolen a collective currency that no one brand could possibly own.

Another scenario is brands initiating Twitter conversations that are essentially solipsistic. Web-site building company Moonfruit conducted a campiagn offering10 free MacBook Pros as prizes randomly awarded to Twitterers who would use the hashtag #moonfruit. The result: #moonfruit became a trending topic, attracting 400 tweets a minute, more than 10,000 times per hour, and 200,000 per day. Moonfruit’s Twitter followers rose to 23,000, and according to a Moonfruit spokesperson, visits to its site were up 600% on day two of the campaign. Some bemoan it as a "tragedy of the commons" or caution that "unless the Twitterverse wises up, we'll end up getting deluged with hashtag spam." I'm not so worried. The different responses to Habitat's and Moonfruit's campaign show that the Twitterverse can self-regulate attention-hijacking attempts and tell the cool from the not-so-cool. Let Twitter do what Twitter can do. All is fair in the conversation wars.

[Picture credit: Werkmann]

Frog Design, the Book: How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business

Frog Design founder and former CEO Hartmut Esslinger has written his first book, and it is available in stores now: A Fine Line – How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business. Part autobiography, part how-to innovation guide, part outlook to the future of design, A Fine Line is "a must-read for designers and business people alike" (Satjiv Chahil, senior vice president, Hewlett-Packard).

A Fine Line offers a step-by-step overview of the innovation process — from targeting goals to shepherding new products and services to the marketplace — in order to reveal how to arrive at an authentic human design that connects strongly with consumers. With a unique perspective, rich stories, and a global mindset, Esslinger explores business solutions that are environmentally sustainable and contribute to an enduring global economy.

Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital, in his foreword, said it all: "Hartmut's book contains the ruminations of a man who has devoted his life to the challenge of marrying the aesthetic with the functional while standing firm against the deadening forces of mediocrity. His work shows that taste can triumph, design and production can be soul-mates, and the eye of an individual can shape a product and a company. The idea that finely designed products can change the fate of companies while also becoming our indispensable companions is a message that millions of us owe to Hartmut."

You can find the table of contents, sample chapters, testimonials, and videos on http://www.afinelinebook.com

And here are some excerpts from a video interview with Esslinger:

Get Social Now!

Several blog posts this week, combined, pinpoint what are arguably the two most influential trajectories for the impact of communication technologies on business these days: from real-time web to real-time business, and from social media to social business design.

Let’s start with the former. Referring to Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff and his presentation at the Structure 09 conference in San Francisco last week, DigitalBeat claims that the real-time web is not only shaping the future of all computing but also that of business overall: “In business it’s real-time or it’s no time.” It goes on by quoting Benioff: “Customers (…) expect everything to happen right away— if they update their data, they expect those changes to appear immediately, not an hour or two in the future. (…) Any concept of batch or delay in development or execution, I think, will not be tolerated by customers anymore. (…) Even in development, customers are demanding now that they want to be able to build in that sandbox and deploy immediately, instantly, no delay.”

Sure, you may say, customers always want it faster and cheaper, that’s not news. But the implications Benioff talks about are more profound and affect the way organizations operate and adapt their business models to the new and ever-changing demands of immediacy. Some examples: Zara, the Spanish clothing chain, uses customer feedback to develop new clothes, in near real-time. TCHO, the San Francisco-based chocolatier, relies on continuous flavor development and customer feedback to drive constantly evolving versions of its dark chocolate, with variations emerging as often as every 36 hours. Status updates, embedded news feeds, and Twitter apps have injected some “real-time-ism” into professional online social networks such as LinkedIn and XING, converting them from address books to conversational circles, from networking forums to collaboration platforms. Zappos, the online retailer, successfully combines real-time customer service on Twitter with near-real-time delivery – having established a powerful, dynamic brand before letting its customers decide what business it was actually in. And Skittles, the candy brand, ingeniously replaced its corporate homepage with the 'Interweb,' a collage of real-time social web conversations not by but about Skittles – essentially recreating itself as the first ever real-time brand. All these models show that the news industry’s big conundrum applies to every other business, too: It used to be that there’s nothing more boring that yesterday’s newspaper. Now there’s nothing more boring than today’s. When you relaunch your business model, product, brand identity, web site – it’s already too late. Real-time beats planning to the punch.

Real-time businesses therefore must get rid of long-term strategy plans, product road maps, goals and objectives, and all the other superfluous documents that distract organizations from focusing on their true mission – the here and now. Most of these documents are inward anyway and can be easily replaced with one strong and permanent mission statement (which, if your company culture is intact, does not even need to be verbalized).

Real-time business is inherently social – there is no real-time without social. The more businesses open up their organizations and invite external voices into their inner sanctum, the more real-time they will become. Getting social will help companies gather customer intelligence in real-time and use it to move faster. In the future, real-time businesses may deliver before their customers even articulate their needs. And they will provide immediate value without immediate return, in other words they will over-deliver – free for now but with a material or immaterial return later. What is the inadvertent business model for media might be a fulcrum for companies that manage to achieve a brand premium through customer participation as a part of real-time product development: “building a plane in the air,” together with their customers.

"The process is the product,” as Trendwatching writes in its latest report, in which it also claims that the real-time the web is breeding a new quest for longevity or “Foreverism”: “the new popularity of technology that allows consumers to find, follow, interact and collaborate forever with anyone & anything.” It’s not as paradoxical as it may sound. Living real-time means living in the ongoing – forever. If everything happens in real-time, nothing is ever final and always in permanent beta. Conversely, if everything lasts forever on the Google web (your emails, networks, conversations) and your digital presence is only as good as your latest search results and Twitter updates, you better utter some digital impressions NOW.

And yet, what’s required is a shift in thinking and ultimately a new organizational model that goes beyond feeding the social media beast on the real-time web: “If the big picture is business transformation, it's going to take more than a few tweets to get there,” David Armano writes in his post on ‘social business design,’ and argues that ““Social Businesses are those which are designed from top to bottom as a reflection of the world we all live in online today. A business where everyone is connected and able to contribute but also where the right tools are available to them to do all of this with business intent from the beginning.”

For centuries, organizations have considered it their task to conquer chaos and manage people, now they have to embrace the sudden chaos instigated by unmanageable throngs of instantly and elegantly self-organized individuals. Whether that will lead to the end of organizations remains to be seen; it will definitely lead to the end of organizations as we know them.

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation

Nice, attention-grabbing title for a blog post, isn't it? Hat tip to my friend Stephan Trueby, an architectural and design critic, who pointed me to The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, a thirty acre private garden in the Borders area of Scotland created by architect and architectural critic Charles Jencks. It is a joining of terrestrial nature with fundamental concepts of modern physics (quantum mechanics, super-string theory, complexity theory, etc.), and the literal and physical manifestation of the craftsman as philosopher, re-uniting the "head and hand divided" (Richard Sennett).

The garden is also a book, and Jencks writes:

"When you design a garden, it raises basic questions. What is nature, how do we fit into it, and how should we shape it where we can, both physically and visually? Some of these questions are practical, others are philosophical, and the latter may not occur to us while laying out a garden, but they are implied. When in 1988 I started designing a garden with my wife Maggie Keswick, at her mother's house in Scotland, we were not concerned with the larger issues, but over the years, they came more and more to the fore. The result has been what I have called 'The Garden of Cosmic Speculation.' The reason for this unusual title is that we - Maggie, I, scientists, and then friends that we consulted - have used it as a spur to think about and celebrate some fundamental aspects of nature. Many of these are quite normal to a garden: planting suitable species which are both a pleasure to eat and easy to grow in a wet, temperate climate. And others are unusual: inventing new waveforms, linear twists and a new grammar of landscape design to bring out the basic elements of nature that recent science has found to underlie the cosmos."

 

Father’s Day Special: Baby Care and Meaningful Marketing

The $10 billion market for baby and young children’s furnishings (cribs, other case goods, layette, nursery decor, and the like) and accessories (car seats, strollers, baby monitors, diaper bags, etc.) is a lucrative market, and the baby stroller is one of its most competitive sectors. Hundreds of models vie for the attention of parents-to-be, and the level of detailed research, due diligence, and individual preferences may come close to the decision making process by an airline for the purchase of a Boeing 787. There are only few things – at least that’s what the industry makes you believe – that are as personal and intimately important to consumers as a baby stroller. The stroller embodies the commitment, care, and love that a couple chooses to devote to their newborn. It is the most visible representation of good parenthood. And in the US, the baby stroller market combines three quintessential American traits into a mind-boggling mix of over-commercialism: an abundance of choices, an obsession about mobility, driving, and vehicles, and a profoundly whacked out paranoia about deficient baby care. All that turns the stroller into a status symbol, especially after the chic Bugaboo arrived on the scene (thanks to Sex and the City) and became the must-have stroller for every DINK (double income-no kids), oops, with kids now – from Los Angeles to New York.

All the more rewarding then is to see a baby and kids super store that defies this irrational exuberance by taking it even a step further, turning a farce into a comedy. Lullaby Lane in San Bruno, CA is a paradise for stroller shoppers precisely because it doesn’t try to be one. It runs three stores and a warehouse in the suburban town south of San Francisco, and surprisingly, the town isn’t named after the brand yet - as perhaps one of the biggest non-big-box baby gear suppliers in the world. The town of San Bruno is adjacent to the San Francisco International Airport (the noise of planes taking off may disrupt your shopping experience at Lullaby Lane every other minute, but my wife used it as an extra lever to lure me into the shop – “if you get bored, you can watch planes.” I love watching planes almost as much as I hate shopping).

But bored I was not. Lullaby Lane is a one-of-a-kind store, independent, grassroots, not slick and shiny – but having been in business for 57 years and family-run, it is the anti-Babies R Us. Almost like a garage sale with sales reps that are a charming mix of car mechanic, Formula One engineer, and precocious kindergartener. Adhering to an old-fashioned model of super-personal customer service, they master folding and unfolding hundreds of different strollers, and go to great lengths to thoroughly analyze each and every feature of the many brands of strollers that they carry – including a live comparison of the performance of the inflatable wheels of the Bugaboo Frog versus the non-inflatable wheels of the Uppa Baby Vista (the Bugaboo is the clear winner). The best thing about Lullaby Lane, however, is its product reviews on YouTube, enhanced by a delightfully ill-placed soundtrack (AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells”) and astonishing, unexpected outbreaks of stroller stunts. You have to see them yourself; here's one example:

The videos are smart. They’re rough, low-budget, authentic, fun, and laden with just enough irony so they don’t turn off hardcore parents-to-be but also cater to the more enlightened shoppers who (wrongly) think that they aren’t succumbing to the baby industrial complex. The videos feature men and are designed to appeal to men, highlighting the strollers’ features and the competitive nature of their performance. You feel like they’re selling you a sports car. Once you’re in the store, however, the sales reps pay closer attention to the mothers-to-be, knowing they will ultimately make the purchasing decision. Even though I was the one asking more questions, our sales rep would always face my wife when answering them. When we left the store, we had bought two strollers (I learned that you need one for home and a lighter one for travel), and we swore we’d come back. There’s always more you need for your baby. Yes, we care. And then we watched planes.

By the way, you may think the Lullaby Lane videos are edgy, but they pale in comparison to the guerrilla marketing campaign conducted by UNICEF in Finland. Wanting to raise awareness for children rights, the “Be a Mom for a Moment” campaign placed fake blue strollers with a crying baby audio track in crowded places in 14 cities. If people looked in the strollers, they would find a note with the message: “Thank you for caring, we hope there are more people like you. UNICEF – Be a mom for a moment.” Apparently, the media and public reaction was overwhelming, with coverage in all the major TV, radio and web news. The estimated media reach was more than 80% of Finnish population after two days.

Lullaby Lane and UNICEF’s campaign share a commitment to meaningful marketing. They successfully connect with their audiences by applying what I call the "five principles of meaningful marketing (pdf):” be social, be personal, be dramatic, be disruptive, and be responsible. Lullaby Lane embraces the idea of generosity (“give more than you take”) and originality (the videos) to create long-term customer loyalty, and UNICEF’s campaign was a perfectly choreographed moment of “disruptive realism.” Both create meaning – events and experiences that you can relate to other events and experiences and that are at the same time so scarce and unexpected that they’re worth sharing.

Happy Father's Day!

(photo credit: UNICEF)

Ahem...What Time Is It?

From Silicon Alley Insider:

Hartmut Esslinger’s “A Fine Line” Debuts at frog’s DMI Reception

 

If you’re not invited yet, invite yourself.

Less is More. The Tweet(ed) Revolution.

Looking at the many positive responses it received, Pico Iyer’s recent NY Times blog post on "The Joy of Less" appears to have struck a chord:

"But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world)."

I take Iyer’s account as further anecdotal proof of my thesis that we are moving towards a new era of post-materialism, in which the quest for meaning, simply put: collective action for the common good, social impact, sustainability, enlightenment, values, etc., trumps purebred material satisfaction derived from the accumulation of things. If ownership, the tyranny of more, means slavery to objects, the less is ephemeral and offers an infinite number of possibilities.

However, I disagree with Iyer on the role of media stimuli. I tend to have a more optimistic view and believe that Twitter, as the modern, accelerated Haiku, can indeed provide you with that “joy of less” that Iyer describes. To counter Iyer with the very Hamlet citation he uses in his text: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” What if Twitter is the impulse purchase of the enlightened digital citizen? What if it has shifted the need for instant gratification from a purely materialistic to a more intellectual realm? On Twitter, the only thing you can truly own is your account; everything else, even your followers, are ever-changing and highly volatile. Needless to say that tweets come and go as much as anything can come and go, and that Twitter doesn’t have a memory, so that all lives on it are limited to the here and now. That’s quite a moment of Zen. And yet, paradoxically, while ‘less is more’ certainly applies to its tweet format, the true attraction of Twitter lies in a ‘more is more’ network effect. The more people join, the more valuable the social conversation becomes.

This weekend, in the aftermath of the Iranian election, Twitter’s ability to build a mass audience by virally connecting myriad micro-audiences through micro-messages has proven again to have real impact. When the Iranian police started cracking down on protesters, CNN chose to air a repeat of Larry King’s interview with the stars of the American Chopper show, which drove the Twittersphere berserk. Other news networks, too, failed to properly cover the dramatic events that unfolded in Iran, but CNN was an easy target because it is so iconic. While the world was tweeting, the ‘most trusted source in news’ misjudged the situation and failed to turn history in the making into a story. In fact, it completely missed the beat and responded somewhat defensively to Twitterers’ accusations:

The anger at CNN may have been collateral damage of Twitterers’ frustration due to having only limited impact over the events in Iran. But the effect was impressive: Within a couple of hours, #cnnfail became one of the top trending topics on Twitter, CNN was faced with a major image backlash, and you could follow the development live on Twitter. Twitter effectively acted as “media watchdog,” as Mashable commented. Citizen journalism outperformed professional journalism - in real-time. When Ahmadinejad shut down all mobile services and social networks, only a few Iranian Twitterers, with just the trusted authority of a genuine voice, were able to stay connected to the rest of the world and report on the frightening events in Iran. Synchronicity, real-time reporting, should have been CNN’s bastion but it didn’t get any of this. Twitter did.

The parallels are striking: The tentative revolution in Iran coincided with a revolution in the American living room. The protests against the Iran regime corresponded with protests against old school gatekeeper media. The social media grassroots campaign against traditional media became a mainstream media story itself. It will be interesting to see if CNN realizes the other startling parallel, the elephant in the room: Both Iran and CNN have cracks in the wall. The days of the old models are numbered. The revolution will happen but it won’t be televised.

The other key take-away from this media weekend is that on Twitter the main story was not the story. The main story is never the story. Twitter is the mainstream for alternative streams. This is why Twitterfall, which displays tweets grouped by trending topics as a top-down waterfall, is the congenial visualization, the most effective user interface for Twitter. Twitterfall expresses the escalation that is an inherent part of Twitter. On Saturday night, #iranelection and #cnnfail tweets broke down in staccato-pace, many tweets per second. It was hard to take your eyes off; it was too easy, too tempting to stand still amidst the constant motion.

Events are synchronous, multi-dimensional, multi-layered, and social, and so must be news. What if the future of news was Google Wave, as Jeff Jarvis suggests, or other "email cum wikis cum Twitter cum groupware"?

“Imagine a team of reporters - together with witnesses on the scene - able to contribute photos and news to the same Wave (formerly known as a story or a page). One can write up what is known; a witness can add facts from the scene and photos; an editor or reader can ask questions. And it is all contained under a single address - a permalink for the story - that is constantly updated from a collaborative team.”

Or is there a news model based on a horizontal comparison of real-time and filtered search (Twitter vs. Google), a la Twoquick? In either case, the aggregators will win (or have already won). The only model that would keep mainstream media in the game would be to combine vertical motion (Twitterfall) with contextual content that is carefully curated: immediacy AND accuracy, intimacy AND authority. Mashable gets it right when it interprets this weekend’s events as an opportunity rather than a swan song for traditional media:

“While social media sites are both a source of unfiltered information and a venue for public discussion, we still look to CNN, the BBC and their ilk to add context and meaning to this flood of data. And when they fail us, we demand more of them.“

Iran Election Coverage: How #CNNfail(ed)

The following screen shots were taken on June 13 between 8:41 pm and 9:15 pm PST.

Don Lemon (CNN Newsroom): "Ok...outta here. love the healthy discussion. i don't take it personally. our coverage was/is appropriate and informative. tweet ya later."

CNN Breaking News Twitter Feed: Only four tweets about Iran.....

CNN.com homepage: Iran is buried in the news column

Twitter: #cnnfail

The Huffington Post: Iran is front and center

BBC: Iran is front and center

DER SPIEGEL: Iran is top news

LE MONDE: Iran is top news

NEW YORK TIMES: Iran is top news

...and the rest

    

frog design Unveils “Power” Issue of design mind Magazine

I'm very happy to announce that we just released the latest issue of our design mind print and online publication. The new issue, the third print edition and tenth overall, focuses on the theme of "Power."

As the global recession has altered the economic landscape, and digital technologies continue to challenge conventional hierarchies, design mind explores new definitions of influence and power. Who has it, where can you find it, how is it being used, and what happens if you lose it?

Highlights of the new issue include an interview with Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford psychology professor, TED speaker, and Abu Ghraib expert witness known for his infamous 1971 Prison Experiment, in which he recruited students to play prisoners and guards in a mock jail until the project took on a disturbing life of its own.

frog founder and legendary designer Hartmut Esslinger offers readers an exclusive sneak peek of his new book "A Fine Line: How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business." The book, to be published by Wiley imprint Jossey-Bass on June 29th, delves into frog's iconic work for global powerhouses including Apple, Disney, Lufthansa, SAP, and Sony.

Other features in the new issue include:
- "Wanted: Chief Meaning Officer": How the new social power of marketing can transform business.
- "Power Up": Ten innovative clean-tech and energy startups to watch.
- "In Search Of": Seven design researchers write about their unusual and wonderful discoveries on the job.
- "Design with Intent": How designers can influence behavior.
- "The Appearance of Influence": Do you have to look a certain way to be powerful?
- "The Napoleon Effect": Why small and simple ideas sometimes bring the most success.
- "The Art of the Unfriend": When social networking becomes social stress.

Written by frog designers, technologists, and strategists, design mind provides the design and innovation community with perspectives on industry trends, emerging technologies, and global consumer culture. The magazine is published three times per year and features interviews with high-profile thought leaders along with contributions from external writers, designers, and photographers. The print edition is currently available for purchase online at designmind.frogdesign.com; in San Francisco at Alexander Book Company and Farley’s; in New York at St. Mark’s Bookshop; and in Shanghai, China, at the 100percent design store. Readers can also access select content from the magazine online along with additional Web-only features including a video series, a blog network, and interactive content from frog’s exclusive speaker series events.

The premier print issue of design mind launched in July 2008 and was widely recognized by the design and business community as well as by publications such as BusinessWeek, Forbes, The San Francisco Chronicle and Core77, which called it "a tightly designed, thoughtful tool." The magazine was selected as a winner for 365: AIGA Annual Design Competitions 30, STEP magazine’s STEP Inside Design 100, and Creativity + Commerce, Print magazine’s International Business Graphics review.

This summer, frog design has been invited to produce a special design mind issue in conjunction with the upcoming TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, UK (July 21-24).

Is Advertising Dead? or The Third Way of Building Brand Equity

(Credit): Element 22

There seem to be three (non-mutually exclusive) models for marketers tasked with building brand equity: marketing scarcity, marketing artificial scarcity, or marketing relevance.

Scarcity seems to be at the core of all marketing: an exclusive, unique value that can be reproduced; an original idea replicated for many. That's how markets work, how marketing works. Branding is effective when it keeps the aura of an original idea intact despite its mechanical reproduction. Apple's original idea, for instance, could be described as "technology must be fun and human," and it has not lost an inch of its integrity. That's the trait of a strong brand: the idea remains scarce while its distribution becomes abundant. The scarcity of all branded, manufactured products is of course artificial. If it wasn't, these products wouldn't need to be branded. That's the whole point (and the difference between water and bottled water.)

Some brands have taken this concept a step further by creating a special type of artificial scarcity: "democratic exclusivity." Sounds paradoxical? Well, it is. But it works. Gmail has pioneered it: An (exclusive) invitation-only service that pretty much everyone can get invited to (democratic). As another example, take Apple's strategy with the iPhone app store. It is a closed system (exclusive) but principally open for third parties (democratic). Look at the Kindle that Amazon purportedly shares as an app for other mobile devices. It shows that it's certainly good to have recognizable hardware (exclusive) but the true value lies in the software that you own and that you can use to extend the reach of your brand (democratic). Or Radiohead's pay-as-you-like release of “In Rainbows”: Buyers could determine the price (democratic) but the offer only stood for a limited period of time (exclusive). The album - online and physical distribution combined - sold more than Radiohead's previous releases, and the radically democratic way of pricing created a significant amount of brand equity for the band. Democratic exclusivity at its best: artificial scarcity in abundance.

The third and perhaps most game-changing model for marketers is selling relevance rather than scarcity. Jeff Jarvis points to Digg's new advertising system that enables users to vote on ads. Techcrunch calls it a "self service advertising product" that is "somewhat similar to Google Adwords, but with a twist." The twist is essentially a reversal of the traditional advertising paradigm: The most popular ads, as voted on by Digg users, will get more prominent placement and a lower cost-per-click. In other words: The more users digg an ad, the less the advertiser pays. "The Digg system rests on a Cluetrainy need to deliver authentic value and relevance – like Google's ads," Jarvis notes, and he argues "that's the way advertising probably needs to go: The better your relationship (which springs from a better product and service), the more your customers will market it for you, the less you'll have to pay to market it." Jarvis is right: "The future of advertising needs to be selling – that is, enabling – relevance instead of selling scarce space, time, or eyeballs. The future needs to be about adding value – relevance – rather than selling scarcity (extracting what the market will bear).”

Equity is the accumulation, the repeated occurrence, of actions, interactions, and transactions that add value. The best way, then, to build brand equity is to repeatedly and consistently add value through all your interactions with customers. Advertising doesn't add value; branded content does (information). Promotions don't add value; branded entertainment does (entertainment). When you brand something, you don't just market scarcity and advertise your products and services, you market your ability to add value that is relevant.

The web, and the social web in particular, reconciles artificial scarcity with relevance, and that's why more and more branding dollars are moving online. It is the ideal forum for creating an abundance of scarce moments, thousands of small great ideas instead of one great big one. These small great ideas come to live in brief moments of attachment with customers that are personalized and truly relevant for them.

"Advertising is failure," says Jeff Jarvis, and he thinks "media only get in the way of customer relationships." And indeed, how will you make more friends at a party? Showing up with a big banner around your neck that says "I am a great friend" or engaging in a handful of conversations with strangers, listening to their stories and detecting affinities whilst accomplishing a sense of privacy that gradually becomes intimate? Right. In the end, that’s what we should be doing as marketers to build real, sustainable brand equity – creating publicity through intimacy, loyalty through decency.

The Conversation Prism

Great chart by Brian Solis, visualizing the conversation economy:
Hat tip to Kristina Loring

“Next Generation Germany” Expert Hearings Hosted by the German Government

Representing my employer, frog design, I was honored to participate in the "Next Generation Germany" initiative. Jointly hosted by four leading German trend research institutes, the Innovation Council of the Endowment Foundation of German Sciences, the Bohnen Kallmorgen & Partners political consultancy, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Next Generation Germany initiative was launched on the occasion of the Federal Republic of Germany's 60th anniversary to enable an interdisciplinary dialogue with civil society and develop a guiding vision for Germany in the year 2030. Key themes and findings of the hearings were presented today at the Future Congress in Berlin. A book documenting the exchange in full detail will be published at the end of June.

The hearings took place between February and April at the Federal Chancellery in Berlin and brought together academics and practitioners from a variety of sectors. Participants represented science, media, NGOs, and corporations, including Allianz Group, Ars Electronica, Bertelsmann Foundation, Brand Eins, Club of Rome, DEKRA, Die Zeit, Free University Berlin, Folkwang Design School, German Center for Social Progress, German-French Center for Social Studies, German Institute for Community Organizing, Trendbuero, and Vodafone Foundation.

The German government is well-advised to embrace open innovation and new digital technologies. Barack Obama's new media-based campaign has fostered the momentum for using the Internet to reach, engage, and mobilize political constituents. Governments worldwide are now exploring the possibilities of social media and mobile communications to enhance their outreach. Citizens, on the other side, expect technology to introduce more transparency to governance and to empower them to actively participate in the agenda-setting and policy-making process.

Self-organization, open- and crowdsourcing, and social networks are enabling new forms of civic collaboration and government-citizen interaction. The innovative use of digital technologies, in particular the mobile and social web, can generate empathy and empower citizens to engage in the political process - both of which are key factors in ensuring leadership, social coherence, and a high quality of life in Germany and around the world.

In Defense of Distraction

I was thrilled to read the riveting “In Defense of Distraction” piece by Sam Anderson in New York magazine this week. Well-surveyed, it covers a lot of different aspects of this complex topic without being overly academic or boring. In fact, and this is the biggest compliment I can possibly give, the article is full of distractions – digressing thoughts that open up unexpected avenues of pleasure for the reader.

Yet the distraction is “focused,” as Anderson would put it. We learn that Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu is not so much the Anti-Twitter as you might think, and that distraction is a requirement for creativity: “This sort of free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process; one moment of judicious unmindfulness can inspire thousands of hours of mindfulness.”And we hear about William James’ “dot experiment,” which led him to assert “that the human mind can’t actually focus on the dot, or any unchanging object, for more than a few seconds at a time: It’s too hungry for variety, surprise, the adventure of the unknown.” Anderson: “This is what the web-threatened punditry often fails to recognize: Focus is a paradox—it has distraction built into it. The two are symbiotic; they’re the systole and diastole of consciousness. Attention comes from the Latin ‘to stretch out’ or ‘reach toward,’ distraction from ‘to pull apart.’ We need both. In their extreme forms, focus and attention may even circle back around and bleed into one other. (…) The truly wise mind will harness, rather than abandon, the power of distraction.”

Exactly! As I’m trying to devote my attention exclusively to one single task – writing an article – for an entire week, I suddenly realize that the absence of distraction equals some kind of mental imprisonment. If you’re not allowed to desert a given task for at least a few moments of aimless meandering through competing attention-grabbing events, you’re deprived of the fundamental dignity of responding to social stimuli. I want to be able to think and look left and right of the "center of attention." I want to be a floating topic and browse through a pool of ever-present options.

Distraction is a human right!

“More Than a Club” or What Brands Can Learn from “Barca”

I’m nervous, seriously nervous. In a few hours, in the Olympic stadium in Rome, FC Barcelona (or “Barca,” as its supporters call it) will face Manchester United, the other soccer superpower, in the game of all games, the final of the UEFA Champions League, the most important club competition in Europe (and the world, for that matter). Both teams have already won two trophies this season (their national leagues and national cups respectively), and a victory in Rome would see either one clinch the “treble.” For Barca, it would be a historic accomplishment – no other Spanish soccer team has ever won all three possible titles in one season. That’s not the only superlative in the lead-up to the game: Messi, Eto'o, and Henry – Barca’s offensive trio – have scored more goals together this year than the entire squad of any other European club.

I’ll be watching the game at a resort near Santa Barbara, and it’ll be the end of journey for me, in many ways: I have been following Barca’s triumphant season leading to today’s final  in different cities all over the world on TV. I saw the team struggle against Lyon in an earlier round in a packed sports bar in Amsterdam; I bit my nails in a smelly pub in Austin when Barca remained goalless in the home tie against Chelsea; I took a day off from work in San Francisco to enjoy them trashing Bayern Munich 4-1; I was in Barcelona in a bar without any Euros but a kind bartender (the comfort of strangers) who even accepted a few lousy dollars for a beer that helped me make it through a dramatic away game; I followed games on the Internet live-ticker in Sonoma County in lack of TV; and I celebrated euphorically the decisive 1-1 goal in Chelsea in the semi-final with my best friend in Hamburg. After all these memorable moments, I realize that I am emotionally exhausted. There’s just enough sentiment left for today’s game. I will use it to cheer Barca to victory.

So I am a Barca fan, but you may wonder why in the world would an otherwise level-headed (I hope) German professional, living in San Francisco, be so crazy about a Catalan soccer team? Joan Laporta, FC Barcelona’s president, asked me exactly that question (more diplomatically phrased) when I met him briefly two years ago at an event at Stanford University, and I uttered something like “because Barca is more than a club.” I felt stupid and exposed as succumbing to the marketing formula the club had promoted for years: “Mes que un club.” But then I thought of that one remarkable moment in Bill Maher’s documentary “Religulous” in which he tries to make fun of the actor who plays Jesus in a Christian theme park in Florida. Not a difficult task, it seems, until that very actor asks him back, with great sincerity and earnestness: “So you think this is all made up and crazy talk. I get it. But what if you're wrong?” There’s a short pause, and Maher, the cynic, has just been disarmed. That’s exactly how I feel about my passion for Barca. Not that Barca is like a religion to me, but it is a matter of faith. It is something to believe in – the why doesn’t matter.

And yet, I could cite very good reasons for why Barca ought to be the favorite club of anyone who loves the “beautiful game.” In fact, Albert Schweitzer must have had Barca in mind when he coined his famous aphorism: “Do something wonderful, people may imitate it.” Much has been written about Barca’s aesthical  play and its underlying philosophy. Barca’s style is a showcase of sparkling creativity, but what one must not overlook is the enormous tactical discipline and the intelligent organization that serve as the platform for the magic moments of Messi, Eto’o, Henry et al. The Barca superstars wouldn’t be able to shine without the works of Xavi, Iniesta, and Toure in midfield, and what pundits have rightly dubbed an “efficient ballet” is a collective movement of great fluidity and elegance, and a unique series of human-ball, human-human interactions that are a true pleasure to watch. One must also credit the incredible discipline that coach and former Barca player Pep Guardiola has introduced to the club this year. When a few players showed up one(!) minute late to a training session last week after winning the Spanish cup the night before, Guardiola reprimanded them and fined them – a symbolic act, of course, but one that reinforced the high standards of professionalism.

One of the other key elements of Barca’s supremacy is anticipation – the ability to predict the opponents’ moves and be just one crucial tick faster than them. This ability is based on the philosophy of “Total Football” that the Dutchmen Johann Cruyff and Luis van Gaal brought to Barcelona, and that Barca still cherishes. Total Football requires every player on the pitch to master any position at any time and to “read” the whole game from any angle. In this fluid system no player is fixed in their intended outfield role; anyone can be successively an attacker, a midfielder, and a defender. Total Football depends largely on the adaptability of each footballer within the team to succeed.

Barcelona embodies Total Football and is yet so much more than just football. To learn more about the genuine element of drama that no other club embraces in the way Barca does, I recommend you read Javier Marias' “All Our Past Battles,” a wonderful collection of stories around the “el classicos” between Barca and arch rival Real Madrid. You’ll understand the melodramatic quality of Barca’s defeats (and wins!), and the great poetry that surrounds all of its appearances, on the pitch and off. More than just once, Barca squandered opportunities to close in on a victory that was thought secure because the team’s abundantly talented players gave in to a seemingly insatiable quest for inspiration, artistry, and class rather than scoring a simple goal. The simple way is never the easiest for Barca. Barca’s striving for excellence feels nostalgic but at the same time very relevant and timely.

Franklin Foer also dedicates a whole chapter to the “Blaugrana” (Catalan for blue/red) club and its political undercurrents in his excellent “How Soccer Explains the World.” FC Barcelona was one of the first soccer clubs to be founded in Spain, and it became a haven for Catalan sentiment when Catalan self-government and culture were proscribed during Franco’s dictatorship. The club emerged as the playful manifesto of Catalonia’s spiritual independence, and since then, nowhere has soccer been more fundamental to the sense of identity than in Barcelona. Former Barca full back Oleguer even published a book which was about politics as much as his own career. Barca supporters joke that he only played when he was not on a protest march.

It is ironic that a club rooted deeply in Catalan nationalism has such an international following. But Barca’s appeal is so global precisely because its roots are so local. Barca represents the Catalan people while at the same time creating a sense of \belonging to “beauty and quality.” The meaning of Barca transcends the boundaries of sports and nations, and embodies the universal values of sportsmanship and integrity.

Every brand can take a page from Barca’s “magic ingredients”:

Aspiration: Barca has always set itself and its members daunting challenges to strive for and rally around. The latest one is “The Great Challenge” campaign which aims at growing the membership, fostering Barca as the biggest and greatest club in world soccer. Before the beginning of this season Barca also declared that its goal was to win all three competitions it participated in. Some may call this arrogance, but for Barca it's a brand driver. The “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” set by excellent teams always need to exceed the past ones. Motivation originates in the belief and opportunity to achieve the extraordinary – no matter what it takes. Under-promise and over-deliver is just good execution. Over-promise and over-deliver are the signs of a class act.

Only the best: Barca’s management and members are never satisfied with average, and they despise mediocrity. They understand top quality, tactically advanced soccer as a moral obligation. Only the best players make it to Barca where the competition is brutal. Analogous to GE's famous 10% rule, the lowest performing players in the team usually have to leave the club.

Social responsibility: Barca is fully owned by its members, unlike most other big soccer clubs - which are either in the hands of  large corporations or American (Manchester United) and Russian (FC Chelsea) billionaires - and they possess significant voting power. This “power to the people” tradition reflects a distinct social conscience that is expressed in many ways. Sure, other clubs are using the power of their brands as well to do good, but no other club’s social responsibility is so deeply engrained in its DNA as Barca’s. Based on its spirit of independence, the club has always taken on broader social issues and played a pivotal role in promoting diversity, tolerance, and peace worldwide. Barca’s partnership with UNICEF is a statement of the club's continuing efforts to be at the forefront of solidarity projects with a global reach. Under the agreement, which bears the slogan “Barcelona, more than a club, a new global hope for vulnerable children,” Barca contributes to the financing of UNICEF humanitarian projects and endorses UNICEF on its shirts – as the only major European team not to wear an advertisement. Club president Joan Laporta rules out any type of commercial shirt sponsorship and  instead seeks to promote a humanitarian message: "FC Barcelona is not only a football club, but a club with a soul.”

The real thing: To a European soccer fan living in the US who has grown accustomed to hyper-commercialized sports events, it is reassuring to see how purist the soccer experience still is in Barca’s stadium, the Camp Nou – a few pre-game commercials, no half-time show whatsoever, and all attention on the players, even during their warm-up exercises before the game. In Camp Nou, it is all about the “beautiful game.”

Charismatic reference point: Messi, arguably the world's best soccer player, serves as a reference point for team mates and fans alike. There is no one else like him, and he outshines all other soccer superstars with his playfulness.

Disruption: Powerful brands need an element of surprise. They should always take the freedom to ignore the quest for consistency and do what they want - irrationally, passionately, and with no regrets. Every three years or so, when a cycle ends, Barca’s management disrupts the existing team structure and builds a new squad. The rule is: Always change a winning team! By all standards of modern business, Barca is a professionally managed club but yet there is a sense that anything could happen anytime – almost like in a soccer match.

The Champions League final today will be another milestone in the saga of the Barca brand, regardless of who wins (2-1 for Barca, my prediction). Humility and hard work have been the traits of Barca's season so far, and in the end, dignity will matter more than titles and trophies at a club that is “more than a club.” And that exactly is the hallmark of a great brand: “Keep yourself clean and bright. You are the windows through which you must view the world,” the ancient proverb goes.

(Brief) Words of Wisdom

(Credit: James Geary)

Amidst all the Twittermania, it's good to remember that the short form has a long history: Aphorisms revealed "truisms" long before 140-character tweets became the predominant art form of the short-attention-span-economy. "An aphorism is a novel packed into a single line," said Oleg Vishnepolsky, using an aphorism himself, or as Wikipedia puts it, an aphorism is a "concise statement containing a subjective truth or observation cleverly and pithily written." Unlike tweets, aphorisms are philosophical rather than mundane, but like tweets their beauty lies in their economy: they're accurate while leaving the all-too-literal unsaid.

James Geary is an aphorism expert and writes a wonderful, aphorism-rich blog on the subject: "All Aphorisms, All The Time,"

Here's a recent entry - "On Edge" - one of my favorites:

"The center, we are told, should be our goal, both our starting point and our destination. But the fringes are far more interesting. It is here, on the periphery, where friction produces its most startling effects. It is here where everything rubs together, where boundaries blur, merge, become extended. Consider. From the tips of our tongues to the soles of our feet, we are all edges. The slightest touch sets off tremors, which ripple out in ever widening orbits—reminders that the universe does not revolve around us; we have to go out to meet it."

Geary will be one of many remarkable speakers at TEDGlobal 2009 in Oxford, UK (July 21-24)

next09: Video of "Chief Meaning Officer" Talk

Here's the video of my talk at next09. Note that I changed the title last minute...

next09: From Google Economy to Twitter Economy

I'm still processing the many great insights from the next09 conference in Hamburg, one of Europe's leading digital/creative/marketing forums and one that stands out from the conference circuit because of its unique German-international focus (bilingual program, 80% international participants, many international speakers). This year's theme was "Share Economy," and the 1,300 attendees consisted of European VCs and angel investors, web 2.0 entrepreneurs, media, creative agencies, and execs from German corporations (from BMW to Deutsche Bank to Deutsche Telekom).

Jeff Jarvis: "The Great Restructuring"

The first day, the keynote day, was a little disappointing, maybe because expectations were so high. Jeff Jarvis warmed up the crowd with his trademark "What Would Google Do?" Powerpoint deck. While a terrific thinker and speaker, for some reason he and the audience did not really click although he presented a lot of thought-provoking content. The rather stiff response may be attributed to the fact that the attendees were either too familiar with what they heard or felt slightly overwhelmed. Or maybe they were indeed excited - but too German to show it…

Umair Haque, who followed Jarvis, faced an even tougher, albeit partly self-inflicted challenge: explaining the new paradigm of "Constructive Capitalism" in 45 minutes. That's like asking Marx to walk you through his Communist Manifesto in a Twitter chat. It didn't help, certainly, that Haque used the much gushed-about Prezi presentation software; all the zooming in and out was dizzying and, if anything, exposed the lack of stringency in his outline.

Fortunately, Haque had an opportunity to correct this first impression and reiterate some of his thoughts on a panel with Jarvis a day later, which turned out to be a much more suitable format for his ideas on the transformation of capitalism. He also took the occasion to rebut the attacks of Andrew Keen ("The Cult of the Amateur"), who, on the opening day, had chastised Haque (and all the other thinkers he considers to be under the dark influence of Silicon Valley) for propagating rampant free market liberalism and a dangerous new radical individualism in the guise of the social, consumer-empowered share economy that the conference was celebrating. Keen poignantly remarked that Twitter was getting us back into the 18th century: rather than liberating us from institutional hierarchies, it would reinforce an old power structure and an all too human division of roles: between those who follow and those followed.

Andrew Keen: "Digital Vertigo"

Jeff Jarvis & Umair Haque: "When Money Talks"

Keen accused Haque et al of naïveté and insisted that Google and the other web juggernauts were not "leveling the playing field" through link love (by sharing the scarcest resource on the web: attention), as Haque had claimed, but were rather using it to expand their pursuit of world dominance. In Keen's eyes, Google's openness is nothing but a suave mechanism to foment a monopoly in the attention markets. In the same vein, a party pooper in the audience asked Jarvis: "If free sharing is the future of business, why doesn't Google share its page rank algorithm?" Jarvis' response wasn't all too convincing: concerns over malicious abuse of the data. Hmm. So much for radical transparency and trust as overriding principles in the share economy.

To Google's (and Jarvis') defense, one could counter with Haque's sharp line: "When we're all hyper-connected, the cost of evil goes up." True. Moreover, Google does provide real value as it has created a win-win-win business model (advertisers, consumers, Google) that is vastly different from the toxic chunk Haque bemoaned in the non-sustainable and ultimately value-free products that toppled capitalism as we knew it: the Hummer, fast food, derivatives, etc. And yet, if advertising is the admission that you have a mediocre product, and that it is in fact an expression of "failure," as Jarvis put it, then it is hard to reconcile this view with the fact that advertising remains the main revenue stream in the very Google economy from which Jarvis wants us all to learn.

Despite the flaws in Jarvis' and Haque's thinking, however, I am eager to defend them. It's easy to deconstruct constructive visions of the future as ill-informed descriptions of present realities but it is a much bigger task to actually come up with a positive vision. Keen, the rebel with a good cause, does nothing but throwing a bomb, which he readily admits, but he falls short of offering an alternative to the frameworks Jarvis and Haque and others provide in response to the fundamental crisis of capitalism.

Google wouldn't care about any of this intellectual arm-wrestling all that much. It is fully consumed with doing what it does best: firing out beta-products and services, successfully failing by failing rapidly. One mistake that it made, however, may arguably have lasting implications. It didn't buy Twitter. And so the question, it seems, is no longer "What would Google do?" but "What will Twitter do?" Does Twitter mark the beginning of the end of the Google economy?

Jyri Engeström, who sold Twitter-competitor Jaiku to Google and is now a Google employee, might have a clue. On a panel with social media guru Chris Messina he offered some good insights on micro-blogging trends on the web and defended the new Google Profiles ("you have to opt in"). Messina seconded him and brought up another interesting point that established the context for upcoming business models in the Twitter economy: the "glocalization" of Twitter. He described how Twitter is failing to extend the real-time conversation to the whole world, simply because of time zone differences: one part of the world is always sleeping when you're tweeting. The instant social web conversation is therefore asynchronous, after all, and it is an interesting thought experiment to envision services that bridge the time zone gap and deliver tweets when the recipients can actually receive them (keeping them on the top of the feed), almost like an echo across time zones. What if the real value of real-time was the delivery of tweets when it really mattered?

The whole time dimension of Twitter is uncharted but valuable territory, and there are other add-ins, integrators, and localization services that will emerge in this vibrant new ecosystem. The conversation on the social web is as rich as the human communication (if not richer), and it is just beginning to fully emerge.

What everyone agreed on at next09 is that the next big frontier on the web (and in the Twitter economy) is how businesses talk to their customers. We are witnessing an irrevocable convergence of players. Conversational services such as Twitter and Yammer are moving into the social networking space and are acquiring the credentials of social networks and collaboration tools, while traditional social networking sites such as XING, LinkedIn or Facebook are embedding conversational features to catch up with the irresistible pull of real-time communication.

For both groups, and in fact for all other companies, Umair Haque's advice is golden: Take one of the big ideals (democracy, peace, transparency, equality, etc.) and apply it to an ailing industry that is in need of transformation or at least some serious disruption: healthcare, finance, news, energy, government – you name it. Combine that with the principles of the Twitter economy – transparency, instantification, collaboration, and free sharing – and you have a winner.